Raisin-Almond Cake

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

Some cakes I bake frequently. This one belongs to it. Actually it is a bundt cake with raisins and sliced almonds, but not baked in the typical bundt cake (Gugelhupf) form. The recipe I have posted ealier here on my blog in the post Bundt Cake with Raisins and Almonds

For the photo I have chosen to place the cake on cook and baking books. There are some books which I often go back to, because the recipes in are typical or foolproof. Some recipes are know for many many years, some from my childhood. If you are German take a closer look at the books and I'm pretty sure, that one you will know: the top one. It is a baking book originally published in 1960 (this is a reprint of the original, the original book belongs to my mother) called "Backen macht Freude". It has been translated into English and is available as "German Baking Today" (published by Dr. Oetker). Unfortunately they have redo it and changed the photographs to meet todays readers expectations. If you have the chance to take at vinatge book, you will see how dramatic food photography has changed. You will get an idea, when you browse the photos of the Vintage Cookbooks group on Flickr.

For the photo I wanted to achive that we all rely on a set of cookbooks, we like or which we are familiar with. The books are arranged in a way, that you can't see which orginal title it is. In the top one I have made a little dog-ear to indicate, that it has been used. With the crumbs I gone a bit messy to empohasize the feeling that it is an every day cake, you grab a slice and you don't take care about crumbs you produce. The background I have over exposed intentionally. I wanted the background just for the brightness and the vague idea of plates and glasses. For the styling I have had to cut off several slices to get the distribution of raisins, almonds and the typical little holes in the cake I wanted, but at the end of the day the cake was done and because I did this cake just for me, it didn't matter that the slices were not that perfect.

For the lighting I have used natural light coming from upper left (window about 2 metres away), smoothed by a curtain. I have used two bonces on front left and right to get light reflected on the cake front. So the brightness gradient was reduced and I could get a nice brightness on the cake without over exposing the background too much. An additional bounce was place on right side to get some more light on the siide of the cake too. I have used 70mm macro lens with a shallow Depth of Field (aperture: f3.5) to get a blurry background and to just have the sharpness on the front part of the cake. I did some minimal adjustment with Photoshop (tonal values adjustment, high pass filter), that's all.